Continuous Delivery for Magento with Fleet

Continuous Delivery for your Magento store with Fleet

You may have heard of continuous delivery (CD) and continuous integration (CI) without giving either term much further thought. It’s not uncommon for e-commerce managers and even some developers to be confused about how CD and CI can improve your online e-commerce store.

Maybe you don’t see the commercial benefits. Maybe you don’t see the need to change your existing processes. Maybe the concept of pushing so many code changes into production every day sounds daunting.

So I’m going to explain why you should, you must, you need to understand CD and/or CI and how to apply the deployment process to your Magento website using Anchor’s Fleet platform.

The speed, method and frequency of your code deployments will each have a massive impact on the success of your e-commerce store. You can expect the following commercial benefits with continuous delivery/integration:

More performance: Testing each release on a ‘like-for-like’ production environment means each iteration of your store’s code will be optimised so that your application serves faster page load times.

Load code releases into identical environments for staging, UAT and production

Roll out or back without your store suffering any downtime

With Fleet, we’ve carefully designed and automated a continuous delivery process like the above for Magento.

If you’re managing your code base within a repository using GitHub or Bitbucket, you’re good to go! No need to download any software. Simply run an alias command within your terminal and the rest is a simple process.

Let’s dive into a live example of how this would work. Say we’re pushing out a new code release for our demo Magento store at http://www.prod.ancora.f.nchr.io. Once we’ve granted you access to push out a new feature you would:

When you create an environment on demand, Fleet will automatically copy the latest snapshot of your database across and run any SQL scripts you have loaded against it. In this case, we have the SQL script update-mage-base-url, which simply changes the Magento Base URLs:

10) Seamlessly rollback, if required, without any downtime. If a bug does find its way into production, don’t stress! There’s no need for a hot fix. Simply reactivate the previous release and you’re done!

$ fleet env activate prod 981e813

And there you have it. A Continuous Delivery process using Fleet. Look out for my next article on how we integrated this process into Codeship along with some unit testing to create a Continuous Integration process, using Slack to alert users to new code release deployments.